Amazon Web Services has made it official that its servers which host several websites witnessed a high volume Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in February this year which might probably be the largest in the company history.
AWS Shield, which defends the entire Amazon data centers from DDoS attacks has endorsed the news and added that the latest attack was 44% larger than anything the company had witnessed before and kept them on foot for three with an “elevated cyber threat status”.
Previously in the year 2018, the technology giant witnessed a DDoS attack aimed to knock of the websites and application hosted on the cloud platform and later it was found that the attack was 1.7 Tbps in strength – meaning web traffic amounting to 1.7 terabytes per second was witnessed flooding the AWS servers at a time.
Although Amazon did not specify the impacted website names, it did admit that the attack was carried out through hijacked CLDAP web servers.
Technically speaking, hackers launch Denial of service attacks by compromising large sections of connected devices with malware and then use them as ghost machines to flood servers hosting websites and operations with fake web traffic to disrupt them temporarily or permanently in some rare occasions.
So, companies especially those related to the Corporate sector use DDoS protection services offered by Akamai and Cloudflare to protect their servers being targeted by humongous amounts of fake web traffic.
